Chávez to eternity

This
indeed is the authentic measure of the late president’s achievements: there is
now no simple switch in Venezuelan public ideology – no going back. The turn in
the post-colonial history of the region is unequivocal.

Supporters of the late President Hugo Chávez. Demotix/Jesus Gil. All rights reserved.

A
slogan, now infamous, was daubed on the walls of Buenos Aires in July 1952 to
mark the imminence of Evita Perón’s death. Viva
el cáncer (long live cancer), the graffiti declared. The atrocious sentiment
has not surfaced much in Venezuela in the long lead-up to President Hugo
Chávez’s death on Tuesday, but it is safe to assume that opponents who essayed a
coup and a general strike as well as innumerable protests, campaigns and
candidacies aimed at bringing down the late leader may have harboured the
thought.

“Why
did you not kill him when you could do so?” This, I have been reliably told by
a witness, was the question directed during dinner at the US ambassador of a
Central American country by a leading business figure in the country,
exasperated at the effect Chávez was having on popular sentiment during his
pan-continental apogee between 2004 and 2008. The ambassador’s reply was
furious and lapidary. “If that is what you think, then don’t be surprised if
you are not around much longer.”

It
is a revealing remark. On one side, we have the typical excrescence of reactionary
Latin American politics, harking back to the Cold War benchmark of US support
for anti-communist national elites. And on the other, we have a US ambassador
that we may assume was not greatly fond of Chávez, nor his inflammatory rhetoric,
but who in the style of President Obama was worldly enough to recognize that
the Bolivarian was no extremist distortion, but an integral part of his
society’s history and expectations.

This
indeed is the authentic measure of the late president’s achievements, the
reason he was rightly praised by Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff on Tuesday evening as
a “great Latin American”: there is now no simple switch in Venezuelan public
ideology – no going back. The turn in the post-colonial history of the region
is unequivocal. Until Chávez and his cohort in Ecuador, Bolivia and elsewhere took
power through the ballot box, every period of revolutionary or radical,
progressive government in Latin America was reversed at the moment of its fall,
often with the aid of military-led violence. The pattern can be found in
Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, Argentina in 1976 or Nicaragua in 1990;
elsewhere, the radicals were not ever allowed close to power. This is the case
of Colombia in 1948 (the Bogotazo), described by Eric
Hobsbawm as “an abortion of a classic social revolution” for which the country,
still one of Latin America’s most violent, continues to pay the price.

In
several of these cases, the radical forces that were stripped of power had not
excelled in government. There were instances of political naivety, or, as the
Sandinistas in Nicaragua proved, galloping corruption; the (hardly progressive)
government of Isabelita Perón that was usurped by the Argentine military set a
high bar for ruling incompetence. Similar charges can be laid at the feet of
Chávez. For years, the Venezuelan opposition and its myriad sympathisers have
berated with good cause economic mismanagement, corruption, spiralling crime
rates, misuse of power, dubious foreign friends and meddling in the judiciary;
the latest devaluation of the national currency, the Bolívar, is an augury of a
fiscal and monetary restructuring that will cause deep pain for the country’s
post-Chávez rulers and population.

Raúl
Baduel was one very knowledgeable critic who I interviewed in Caracas in 2008,
one year after he left his post as defence minister. His summation of “socialism
in the 21st century” has stood out as the neatest encapsulation of
the opposition’s swarm of valid criticisms and fevered resentments. “The
repetition of basic slogans empty of content, which was aimed at sustaining
nothing but the personal ambition of President Chávez to become life president
of a Venezuela that grows ever poorer.” Wrong in at least one respect: Chavez
has passed away. Baduel, meanwhile, has been in a military jail since 2009,
accused of fraud.

Many
other commentators, in all manner of outlets, have rehearsed and reiterated the
late president’s virtues and vices. They will continue to do so, and one senses
that these disputes will evolve into a continuous matter for historical
inspection. But there remains something fundamentally amiss in the argument, a
misreading of Venezuelan politics that assumes Chávez to have been either a
deranged paratrooper, or, in the eye of his supporters, a charismatic visionary
wearing the mantle of Bolívar and Ché Guevara, when in fact he was a perfect
outgrowth of his time and place. And his faults in government, which cannot be
denied, were as much the results of these initial conditions as they were
effects of his strategic masterwork.

Throughout
his career, from his inception as a clandestine military conspirator in the 1980s,
to his emergence as coup leader, political mobilizer and presidential candidate
in the 1990s, and finally to his enthronement as elected and re-elected
president, two elements of Venezuelan public life shaped his acquisition and
use of power. These were the utter corrosion of the party duopoly that had run
the country since 1958, and which had converted formal office into a façade for
handing out spoils and oil revenues; and the magnification of social and
political polarization through income differentials and an apparatus of social
segregation, whose consequences were first displayed to the world via the Caracas riots of 1989.

Throughout
his presidency, but particularly after his referendum victory in 2004, Chávez
ruled through informal channels, as his predecessors had done, and harnessed
the tremendous social polarization that festered in the 1990s, forming an
extraordinary emotive connective tissue with the low-income majority. There are
many good reasons to condemn Chávez’s rule. But there is no erasing the first
sights I had of Caracas in 1993, where small huts clung to eroding hills while
the national press ran pages and pages of photos from what were supposed to be philanthropic
cocktail evenings.

The new geometry

From
this soil, Chávez proved exceptionally adept at agglomerating groups, forming
coalitions, scenting opportunity and building a tremendous and durable power
bloc; helped all the while by soaring oil prices. His skills as president were
great, though not infallible: he needed the outrage of the urban poor to save
him from the coup of 2002, and he certainly required a dose of enforced
moderation to recover from his vainglory of 2007, when he pursued the “corpse”
of President Bush up and down Latin America and lectured Venezuela’s National
Assembly for six hours on the need to redraft the Constitution in ways that
best suited him. He lost the ensuing referendum, his only clear defeat at the
polls.

Without
him, the chavista regime will face
stiff challenges, not helped by the strong possibility of factional disputes
unresolvable through their Leviathan. A coherent plan was laid out by Chávez
ahead of his final duel with cancer: a civil and military compact at the heart
of a new geometry of chavismo. This
would combine a civilian political centre, doubtless fought over by interim President
Nicolás Maduro and the speaker of the Assembly Diosdado Cabello, and a string
of regional bosses allied to the military establishment: 11 of the 23 state
governors are now former officers. But amid economic stresses, factional
infighting and the presence of various armed militia, the stability of this
equation remains in some doubt.

A provisional verdict

However,
these are matters for the coming weeks and months. They shadow any conclusions
as to Chávez’s record, make any attempt at establishing his achievements provisional
at best. Yet at the risk of entering an early verdict that is abruptly
overturned, it would seem there are three aspects of the Chávez years that can be
counted as a legacy.

The
first derives from his own egalitarian and levelling ambitions. If we take the
latest Social Panorama of Latin America,
published by the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (known
in Spanish as CEPAL), we find possibly the most reliable evidence of
Venezuela’s social progress: poverty rates fell from 49.4 per cent in 1999,
when Chávez took power, to 29.5 per cent in 2011. Venezuela, the report adds,
is the most egalitarian country of 18 nations in Latin America, and has the third
lowest perception of unfairness in income distribution. Furthermore, polls
provided from Latinobarómetro have
long shown that Venezuelans are amongst the most satisfied with democracy in
the entire region.

These
are impressive statistics, but should be qualified. Obviously, the resources to
achieve such progress have come from an economy that is more oil-dependent than
ever. They also fail to take into account the country’s colossal crime and
murder rates, and their corrosive effects on social capital. Lastly, and most
importantly, they also mirror achievements across the region as a whole: a
World Bank study from last year indicated that Latin America’s middle classes
have grown by 50 million over the last decade, while poverty rates as a whole
have fallen from a high point of 44 per cent in 2002 to 29 per cent in 2012. Thus,
far from making an exceptional contribution to social welfare, the late
president appears to have formed part of a broader phenomenon in which he is
condemned to share plaudits with the centre-left in Brazil, or the right in
Colombia and Panama. His outstanding achievements in reducing inequality may in
turn owe much to the steady emigration of upper and middle classes: 244,000
Venezuelan were registered as living in the United States last year.

A
little more confidence can be attached to Chávez’s efforts to rebalance relations
between his country, Latin America and the rest of the world. His contribution
to processes of regional integration, though not always consistent, was crucial,
not least in the creation of UNASUR
and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). His military
spending (an estimated 11 billion US dollars to Russia from 2004 to 2011), his
anti-imperial harangues and his friendships with assorted tyrants were perhaps not
to everybody’s taste, but they successfully worked as decoys for the new
independent diplomacy of Brazil, and created the sort of geopolitical atmosphere
in which Latin American countries for the first time ever could demand a new global
regulation of drugs.

Inequality and revolution

At
least until 2011, his was never a quiet or exhausted presidency. Such energy
served a crucial role in reanimating publics left without purpose or resources
in the neo-liberal winter of the early 2000s. But it was the manner in which he
did this which will survive as a second legacy: far from allowing differences
and divisions to be naturalized as part of the unbreakable social order, the
norm throughout Latin American history, he dramatized them, flavoured them for
his audience (“we are the rabble who followed Bolívar”, protesting students
were “daddy’s little kids” etc.), and then made points for political action.

This
struck many in and outside Latin America as deeply offensive: one only need
think of The Economist’s praise in
2010 of the new British prime minister and his deputy to sense how many in the world’s
metropolitan elites have reacted to such diatribes (both were “well-adjusted
human beings. You search in vain on both men’s shoulders for the chips that
typically burden and motivate politicians”).
Exceptionally chippy though he was, Chávez was not the first to name
inequality; but he was the first post-Cold War democrat to make systematic use
of it. And so long as the issue is alight in Latin America’s public
consciousness, it remains more probable that the continent’s inequities will
remain free of government neglect.

His
last legacy, however, is less certain to garner praise. Chávez’s weak spot is
the one that has plagued almost every Latin American revolutionary, and which
for now, judging from experiences in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador or Nicaragua,
remains ineradicable. At root, the changes Chávez established were not of
systems but of personnel; those who were poor, mestizo or excluded have entered power, but in the process have not
managed to change the way power works, nor the circuits of patronage and
dependence it relies upon. They have simply become the new oligarchs: the boli-bourgeoisie. In this respect, it
spoke volumes that the great dame of Mexican trade union politics, Elba Ester
Gordillo, who was born into dire straits in Chiapas and donated a kidney to her
dying husband at the age of 20, was arrested late last week for embezzling over
150 million US dollars.

From
what we know, Chávez had no interest in his own economic fortune. His family
and allies, however, certainly did. Whether they will follow the radical
pursuits of the pioneer or settle back into oil-fed inanition is unclear. Chávez
has gifted a style and method of government that is now part of Latin America’s
democratic furnishings, but he can only reprimand his colleagues in the
language of dreams.

About the author

Ivan Briscoe is a fellow of the Conflict Research Unit, which is part of the Clingendael Institute of International Relations in The Hague. After working as a journalist and newspaper editor in Argentina, France and Spain for over a decade, he now specialises in the study of fragile states, the effects of inequality and the emergence of organised crime.

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